Mike Yurk fishes on Pine Lake near Somerset, Wis., on July 29, 2009. (Paul A. Smith/Milwaukee Journal Sentinel/MCT)
A silver maple leans to the side, its supple limbs melding with a sea of cattails.
A bullfrog croaks from somewhere in the marshy tangle. A great-blue heron pokes its head out. Is it walking or wading?
It's hard to tell, amid the abundance of summer, where the land ends and the water begins.
It's hard to know, too, exactly where we are.
Mike Yurk powers up the electric trolling motor and eases the boat away from shore. Bleached tree stumps protrude above the weed-choked water.
The undeveloped shoreline is obscured in a verdant tug-of-war between grass and forest.
The first fish of the day doesn't exactly provide the zip code, either.
"There's one," says Yurk, steering a lively 12-inch largemouth bass around a deadfall. "The question is how many will follow."
After a minute, he reels the fish to hand, pops out the Texas-rigged plastic worm and releases the fish.
On a muggy, summer evening in a weedy, bass-filled lake, we could be many places in the United States.
Perhaps Alabama or North Carolina, among the many places Yurk was stationed during a 22-year career in the U.S. Army.
It might surprise some to learn we are on a small lake in northwestern Wisconsin, a region better known for walleye and musky, but with many waters filled -- overpopulated, even -- with largemouth bass.
"It's been one of the great discoveries of my life," says Yurk, 59, of Hudson.
That and meeting his wife, Becky, whom he affectionately calls The Bass Queen.
Traveling to lakes in St. Croix and Polk counties within an hour of his home, Yurk says he commonly catches 30 to 40 bass in an outing.
"I've fished in a few places," says Yurk, who grew up in Oshkosh and learned to fish for perch and walleye but acquired a love for bass while stationed in Spain. "The action for bass in this part of Wisconsin is something else."
This evening we've trailered his boat to a small, lobed lake known locally as Pine Lake but shown on some maps as Bass Lake.
The character of the lake has no similar ambivalence.
"Bass and bass," says Yurk. "And plenty of them."
It features a series of rounded segments splayed out west-to-east from the public launch. In the droughty conditions of 2009, each section is nearly pinched off from the next by a sand bar.
A bullfrog croaks from somewhere in the marshy tangle. A great-blue heron pokes its head out. Is it walking or wading?
It's hard to tell, amid the abundance of summer, where the land ends and the water begins.
It's hard to know, too, exactly where we are.
Mike Yurk powers up the electric trolling motor and eases the boat away from shore. Bleached tree stumps protrude above the weed-choked water.
The undeveloped shoreline is obscured in a verdant tug-of-war between grass and forest.
The first fish of the day doesn't exactly provide the zip code, either.
"There's one," says Yurk, steering a lively 12-inch largemouth bass around a deadfall. "The question is how many will follow."
After a minute, he reels the fish to hand, pops out the Texas-rigged plastic worm and releases the fish.
On a muggy, summer evening in a weedy, bass-filled lake, we could be many places in the United States.
Perhaps Alabama or North Carolina, among the many places Yurk was stationed during a 22-year career in the U.S. Army.
It might surprise some to learn we are on a small lake in northwestern Wisconsin, a region better known for walleye and musky, but with many waters filled -- overpopulated, even -- with largemouth bass.
"It's been one of the great discoveries of my life," says Yurk, 59, of Hudson.
That and meeting his wife, Becky, whom he affectionately calls The Bass Queen.
Traveling to lakes in St. Croix and Polk counties within an hour of his home, Yurk says he commonly catches 30 to 40 bass in an outing.
"I've fished in a few places," says Yurk, who grew up in Oshkosh and learned to fish for perch and walleye but acquired a love for bass while stationed in Spain. "The action for bass in this part of Wisconsin is something else."
This evening we've trailered his boat to a small, lobed lake known locally as Pine Lake but shown on some maps as Bass Lake.
The character of the lake has no similar ambivalence.
"Bass and bass," says Yurk. "And plenty of them."
It features a series of rounded segments splayed out west-to-east from the public launch. In the droughty conditions of 2009, each section is nearly pinched off from the next by a sand bar.
